by Mike Hartman
**********
Driving home in his Mercedes, McCoskey fumed about this recent development. This was his company. He had been here the longest and had put the most sweat equity into the place. He had been the brains behind the operation all along. Sure, Dr. Bowles had made Sally the lead project manager, but that was just because she was pretty and easy to look at. It was really just a figurehead position. The only reason Bowles didn’t promote him was because he was too important to be pulled away from the research. That was where the real brains were needed.
The more he thought about this on the way home, the more he convinced himself that he wasn’t about to let Sally take his company away from him.
Chapter 32
July, year 3.
Jamie and Jillian rode their bikes south along the Los Gatos Trail from downtown San Jose. Yesterday’s funeral had not been a pleasant experience and neither of them wanted to sit around the apartment. They had both wanted to try this bike trail and today presented the perfect opportunity.
The weather was warm and sunny. The sky was blue. There was the gentlest of breezes blowing. It was the perfect day for a bike ride.
As it turned out, the trail took them through several parks along the way. First they came to Campbell Park, and then further south they rode through Los Gatos Creek Park. Continuing on they came to the Vasona Lake County Park which surrounded the Vasona Reservoir.
“Let’s stop here for lunch,” said Jillian. They dismounted and laid out a blanket they had brought. Lunch was light; sandwiches and soft drinks. As experienced bikers they had learned to pack light and fit the important things into their backpacks. It was really amazing what they managed to tote around with them.
As they ate Jillian said, “I love this place.”
“Yeah, it’s a pretty lake,” Jamie responded.
“No, I mean California. I never dreamed I’d be living in California, riding bikes, stopping for picnics in the park. I love my life! And I love sharing it with you!” She gave Jamie a wink.
“We’re pretty lucky,” Jamie agreed. “I never really dreamed of this life either, but you won’t hear me complain about it. Things have worked out really well for us.”
“I’m planning to go over to Sally’s tomorrow,” said Jillian. “She asked me and Monica to come over for some girl’s time. I wonder how she’s doing.”
Jamie could plainly see that Sally was devastated. He had only seen her a few times since they received the news, but she was obviously distraught. “Probably not too good,” he said. “She and Dr. Bowles were close. I think they have known each other for about 13 years. There seems to be a lot of water under the bridge between the two of them. She looked terrible yesterday at the funeral. I’m guessing she is taking this pretty hard.”
“I know, I feel terrible for her,” said Jillian. “I hope I can help her in some way.”
They continued to talk for another 30 minutes and then Jamie suggested they rent a paddle boat. It was truly a great afternoon.
**********
Monica picked up Jillian at 11:00am. “Hey chick,” said Monica as Jillian climbed in the passenger seat.
Jillian struggled for a few seconds with her seat belt. “Have you talked to Sally since the funeral?”
“I called her yesterday to check up on her,” said Monica. “She sounded pretty down. I told her we would stop by the grocery store to pick up some sushi and a bottle of wine on the way over. That new supermarket has a man that makes sushi rolls fresh, made to order.”
“Sounds good,” answered Jillian. “Let’s make it two bottles of wine though.” They laughed and drove on. They had become quite close in the past two years. It was hard to believe two years had gone by already since they first met when Jillian went to work at Brainstorm.
**********
The front door was open when they arrived at Sally’s house so they let themselves in. “Hello?” shouted Jillian as they walked through the door.
“I’m in here,” called Sally from the kitchen.
Monica and Jillian were surprised to see Sally with her hair fixed and looking good. She was baking cookies and the kitchen smelled great. “I figured we would need some chocolate chip cookies for desert,” she said. “They will go good with the wine.”
“You really know how to host a girl’s day in style,” said Monica. “A little chocolate and wine will win me over any day.”
The girls moved out to the back patio and set up lunch. The wine glasses came out and the day progressed nicely.
“How are you doing?” Monica asked Sally.
Sally tried her best to look convincing. “I’m okay.”
Monica took Sally’s hands and looked her in the eye. “No really. How are you doing?”
Sally teared up just a bit and admitted, “It’s hard. He was like a father to me. He was always there for me and I looked up to him in ways you can’t imagine. I miss him so much!”
Monica hugged her friend and Sally broke down and cried on her shoulder. After a long while Sally calmed down and separated herself from the hug. “Thank you,” she said. “I needed that more than you know.”
As they poured another glass of wine Sally said, “I’ve been trying so hard to make sense of it all. It just doesn’t make any sense. Who would want to hurt Dr. Bowles?”
“I’ve been wondering the same thing,” said Jillian. “He was such a good guy. He seemed like the kind of person who didn’t have any enemies.”
Monica suggested, “Maybe it was just random.”
Sally shook her head. “No, I’ve tried to convince myself it was just a random act of violence, but deep in my heart I know it wasn’t. There is something you two might not know about. Three years ago, about six or eight months before you came to work for us we had another tragedy in the company. We had eight research scientists working at Biotech at that time. One morning I came to work and discovered seven of them lying on the floor in the lab. They were all dead. McCoskey was the only one who survived. Apparently the seven of them had worked late into the night, but McCoskey had left early. We never found out the cause of their deaths. The autopsies didn’t turn up anything. It was all just a big mystery.”
Monica and Jillian looked on in disbelief. Jamie had not told Jillian about the event and this was the first time either of them had heard about it.
“It’s just too big of a coincidence that another member of the company got murdered,” said Sally. “They have to be related. I just can’t figure out how.”
“Do you have any theories?” asked Monica. “Are there any leads?”
“The police came up empty handed on the seven scientists. They didn’t come up with a single lead. I didn’t suspect him at the time, but there have been times over the past three years when I wondered if McCoskey had anything to do with it.”
Monica felt herself become instantly defensive. “He wouldn’t do anything like that,” she said. “He’s a bit odd and egotistical, but he’s not a killer.”
“Let’s hear her out,” chimed Jillian. “What made you think he might be involved?”
Sally answered slowly, “Well, he’s just always had his own ideas about how things should be done. It’s like he is constantly driving the company in a different direction from what the rest of us think is the correct course.”
“That doesn’t make him a killer,” defended Monica.
Sally told them about the day in the park when McCoskey acted so strange and apparently conducted some sort of information exchange with the man in the white sedan.
Jillian said, “Well, that certainly is strange behavior.”
“He is never willing to wait until the proper timetable plays out. It seems like he is always looking to advance the clock at his own pace regardless of the desires of his boss.”
“He’s just a harmless womanizer who is absolutely full of himself!” said Jillian. All three girls got a g
ood laugh out of that, but Sally retained that uneasy feeling.
Changing the subject Sally asked in a very serious tone, “What are we doing anyway? Why are we developing the tick? What will it eventually be used for?”
Monica and Jillian just looked at her. It wasn’t their company. They were just developing the product for Dr. Bowles. They really didn’t know why he was developing it.
Sally continued, “I knew Michael Bowles well enough to know he had a reason for everything he did. He had a customer in mind for this project, but he never once mentioned it to me. I don’t know why we are working on this project and I don’t even know who we would sell it to if we perfected it.”
“I’ve wondered about that,” admitted Monica. “Can you imagine what this technology could do if it fell into the wrong hands? Criminals could use it to gain confidential information like PIN numbers for people’s ATM’s, passwords to their accounts, and any number of things I could probably never even think of.”
“Those are probably mild examples of what the wrong person could do with this thing,” said Jillian as she pulled the cork out of the second wine bottle. “Our innocent minds probably couldn’t even think of all the illegal and sinister uses people could find for the tick.”
Sally said, “I’m just wondering if I should suspend research on this project until I can figure out the answer to some of these questions. When I really stop to think about the possibilities, I have to wonder about the ethics involved. I need to know that I am moving in the right direction and for the right reason. At this point in time I don’t have any idea why we were developing this thing in the first place.”
“If we don’t work on this, what will we work on?” asked Monica.
Sally answered thoughtfully, “I just don’t know.”
The girls spent the rest of the afternoon discussing the situation from every angle. In the end they still didn’t have any more answers than what they started with.
**********
A few hours later, after Jillian and Monica had left, Sally continued to sit on her patio and think about the situation.
The tick was no longer a concept project. They had developed several working prototypes and were currently testing it on chimpanzees.
Their initial problems capturing brainwaves had been solved with a brilliant discovery by Jillian. She had remembered catching the lizard during her walk with Jamie one evening when they were at college. She remembered telling him about an article she read about a company that identified a compound called reversinal, which could induce a cell to undergo reverse differentiation. Long story short, using reversinal and subjecting it to a modulated signal at exactly 20 kilohertz would create biological growth. This precise frequency would cause cells to change into their precursors and then develop into nerve cells.
They had successfully reduced the size of the tick to the size of a small sunflower seed. It had 8 legs and moved much like a real tick. Gabe had brilliantly engineered the mechanisms that made this possible. It was programmed to find the host by tracking the body heat and then crawl to a location on the back just between the shoulder blades. By monitoring the electrical impulses emitted from the spinal cord, the tick would position itself to the exact location between thoracic vertebrae T4 and T5.
The tick would make a tiny incision about the width of a hair follicle. A tiny probe was then inserted under the skin. The end of this probe contained the reversinal compound. Only a few molecules were needed. A modulated signal was applied to the probe at 20 kilohertz. This caused the cells to grow into nerves as tentacle-like extremities that sought out and joined together with the spinal cord of the host. Signals from the brain were transmitted down the spinal cord and intercepted by the tick.
Monica had worked tirelessly to decode the signals they intercepted. Her program currently had 950,000 lines of code and could decode the vision. Basically, whatever the host saw with their eyes, the tick could see and transmit back to its responder.
She still didn’t know how Jamie developed the microchips that made all this possible. She had an amazing team of research scientists. It was unbelievable what they had been able to accomplish. The question that continued to haunt her however, was why they were developing this technology in the first place. The last thing she wanted to do was develop a sinister device that people would use for evil purposes.
As she thought this over, she heard the doorbell ring from inside the house. She got up, entered the back door and walked through the house. She wasn’t prepared for the visitor who stood on her front porch. She hadn’t known it just a few minutes ago, but her day was just getting started.
Chapter 33
July, year 3.
Mickey sat back in his seat on the Boeing 737 and tried to relax. He had mixed feelings about his trip. He hadn’t been home in 2 years and wasn’t really sure he wanted to go there now. He had left that life behind him and managed not to look back. At least not very often.
Prototype had been a good experience. The first four and a half months were pretty strenuous. He worked 12-hour days with rotating shifts. That meant seven days straight on day shift followed by two days off, then seven days in a row on the afternoon shift followed by three days off, and then seven days straight on the midnight shift followed by four days off. This cycle repeated over and over again. Studying 12 hours a day was hard enough, but the rotating shifts threw a whole new twist on the idea. It was tough and it was challenging, but it had also been rewarding and he felt good about himself for his accomplishment.
He had qualified as a Reactor Operator after four and a half months at prototype. This was pretty quick. It took most people five months or even five and a half. The advantage to qualifying quickly was that you only had to work 8-hour days after you qualified.
Prior to qualification he typically studied for eight hours a day and stood watch in the nuclear plant four hours a day under the direct supervision of an instructor. After qualifying, he was able to stand watch as a Reactor Operator by himself without the instructor present. He spent the other four hours a day helping the other students study to reach their qualification goals.
It was an exhilarating experience the first time he stood watch solo. Such a great amount of responsibility having a 150 mega-watt reactor literally in the palm of his hand! He had nightmares that first week after qualifying. Nightmares where he made a mistake that caused a reactor meltdown and killed thousands of people. Three nights in a row he had woke with a start in a panicked cold sweat. Fortunately these night panics had passed after about the first week.
The captain turned on the seatbelt sign and announced their decent into Chicago O’Hare. He had almost a two hour layover in Chicago before his connecting flight home to San Jose.
This was the first time he had taken any leave since departing for boot camp two years earlier. Now he was taking 30 days of leave while awaiting transfer to his submarine, the Henry M. Jackson, SSBN 730. He began to wonder what he was going to do with himself for 30 days. He had to admit he was a little bit excited about seeing his mom after all this time. A few days of visiting with her would be enough though. The last time he heard, Red was off fighting terrorists in Afghanistan. There really wasn’t anyone else he wanted to see.
He was wondering if he made a mistake by selling his car in New York before the trip. If he had a car for the next 30 days he would travel around and see the country. That sounded good, but he knew the truth was that old beater would have never made the trip home.
He watched out the window as the plane descended back to earth and the wheels skidded onto the runway. The flight had been uneventful and the landing was smooth. The pilot taxied up to the concourse and Mickey waited along with everyone else as they stood in the queue to get off the plane.
He was glad he had such a long layover. He arrived at concourse A and had to transit all the way to concourse C for his connecting flight. He c
aught the tram and went to find his gate before looking for something to eat. Once he comfortably had the gate in sight he decided on a sandwich shop and browsed the menu.
He was thinking to himself how super high the prices were when a man grabbed him firmly by the arm from behind. Startled, he turned to see none other than his smiling friend. “Red!” he said with surprise.
Red said, “What in the world are you doing here?”
Mickey answered, “I’m on my way home from New York. I’ve got 30 days leave before I report to my sub. What about you? Where are you headed?”
“I’ve got a week of leave myself,” Red was excited. I just got back from Afghanistan and get to go home for a week before reporting to my new duty station. It’s a rough one. They are forcing me to go to Pearl Harbor!”
“You lucky dog!” said Mickey. “What flight are you on?”
“I fly out of gate 25 at 7:55.”
“Me too. I’m in seat 12D. How about you?”
“I’m in seat 25A. Maybe we can get someone to trade with us so we can sit together.”
They swapped stories about the past two years as they munched on six dollar sandwiches and three dollar potato chips. Red told him all about his first failed attempt at BUD/s and then his later success. He told him about the grueling conditions of the training and the even worse conditions in Afghanistan. Most of his missions in Afghanistan were classified, so there was a lot he couldn’t say.
Mickey told Red about his training as an Electronic Technician, and then Nuclear Power School, and finally his qualification at prototype in New York. They had a lot of stories to catch up on and fortunately they did find someone to trade seats so they were able to continue the conversation on the plane.
About an hour and a half into the flight they began to run out of stories and each settled back in his seat to relax and enjoy the rest of the flight.
Chapter 34
July, year 3.
“Welcome back everyone,” said Sally from the chair at the head of the conference table. This was the first time she actually sat in this chair. It seemed a bit strange. At the same time it seemed exciting and fitting. The week off had given her time to think things through. Although she had severe doubts just a week ago, she now knew exactly where they were heading and she was prepared to lead the way.